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Paper short abstract

Following Nicolae Gheorge’s method of documenting the gaps between the plan and the outcome, or expert knowledge and lived experience, our dialogical research experiment aims for an ironic analysis of local development projects in the field of Roma integration in Hungary and Romania.

Paper long abstract

The late Romanian Roma sociologist and civil leader Nicolae Gheorghe proposed to search for a new vocabulary in response to what he conceived as the failure of liberal human rights-based projects in the field of Roma integration amid the rise of nationalism and anti-Gypsism on a European scale. The ironic study of development aims to document the gaps between norm and practice, or expert knowledge and lived experience, as a way to avoid doing more of the same (such as reinforcing existing polarizations). Pulay collaborated with Gheorghe while doing fieldwork in a notorious “problem zone” – actually a mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian poor neighborhood – of Bucharest, that became the target of development projects as part of the ongoing Europeanization of Roma issues. Balázs followed Gheorghe’s analytical guidelines during her collaborative research and community organizing work in a small town in northern Hungary, where two significant conflicts occurred in the post-socialist period, each giving rise to an NGO boom and successive waves of civil society and legal interventions. While these interventions produced visible and tangible rights-based outcomes in both instances, relations between local Roma and non-Roma residents became further radicalized in the aftermath of both events, and by 2010 the town had become a stronghold of the radical right. Finally, we present our results as well as failures to address the stakeholders by revealing the deep story of the conflicts and also to evaluate the prospects of critical renewal that Gheorghe envisaged both in social analysis and intervention.